PleisTechnoVar is an acronym for the title of a research project in prehistory: "Technological Variability during the Late Pleistocene in Eastern Africa: lithic assemblages as indirect witnesses
of past human population dynamics". This research project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie agreement
No 655459.
PleisTechnoVar aims to better understand the increase in technological variability observed in Africa during the Late
Pleistocene, between 70,000 and 15,000 years ago. While many research projects have focused on the origins of Homo sapiens and its spread Out of Africa
into Eurasia, less research has concerned the material cultures of the populations who ‘stayed’ in Africa and how they interacted with each other. The
first objective is to study this variability on the regional scale of Eastern Africa, between Kenya and Ethiopia. The second is to develop
a methodological approach to understand the factors driving this variability. A larger scale of analysis will be used and Eastern Africa as well as the Nile Valley and the Levant will be considered in order to propose hypotheses concerning links
between technological variability, environments and population dynamics. In order to meet these objectives, lithic assemblages will be studied using the
concept of chaîne opératoire and attribute analyses. Data collection will take place during short visits to museums in Eastern Africa, Israel
and Europe. Spatial analyses will complete the study. These data will then be discussed in view of the known palaeoenvironmental data, as well
as the results from the study of other types of material (zooarchaeology, geomorphology, etc.).
To know more about the archaeological sites studied in this project, click here.
This research mainly takes place at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, at the University of Cambridge (United
Kingdom). However, it also implies research visits to the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi, to the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel
and to the British Museum in London where major stone tool collections are stored and are of interest for this study.
My name is Alice Leplongeon and I am conducting this research as a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
University of Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Dr Philip Nigst.
